


Team FREE WILL loves MISHA - A GiSHWhES Story

by Jacqueline Albright-Beckett (xaandria)



Category: Supernatural, Supernatural RPF
Genre: Crack, GISHWHES, Gen, Gift Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-08 01:28:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5478194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaandria/pseuds/Jacqueline%20Albright-Beckett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A vortex of impossibility has caused Cas and Misha to trade places, and only completing GiSHWhES items will trigger the vortex to switch them back. A cracky Christmas gift for my fellow gishers on Team Purgatorgy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Team FREE WILL loves MISHA - A GiSHWhES Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Team Purgatorgy](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Team+Purgatorgy).



Dean stared at the screen Sam had shoved in front of him, his eyebrows climbing fractionally higher at every bullet point until he was fairly certain they were somewhere in the vicinity of his hairline. “You can’t be serious.”

Sam shrugged. “It’s the only way I can think of that might...I don’t know. Flip them back.”

“How is that even supposed to work?” Dean scanned the list again. “How is building a giant paper airplane going to send this Misha dude back to wherever he’s from and bring Cas back?”

“You guys do know that I’m sitting right here,” the third person at the table pointed out. Dean glanced over at him. He looked like Cas, but...not. Definitely not. Cas was not nearly the little shit that this guy was.

“I think it’s a combination of all these nearly impossible objectives that creates a...portal of some sort, centered around the individual. That’s what happened to get him here -- so many people did so many of these that it created a pocket of improbability around Misha and...here he is.” Sam took the laptop back and furrowed his brow. “This one actually looks dangerous.”

“We deleted that one,” Misha interjected. “You have an outdated version of the list.”

“Who comes up with this crap?” Dean groused as he read over Sam’s shoulder.

“Me. My kids. My wife,” Misha shrugged. “Various other people.”

Dean flicked his eyes upward to fix Misha with an even, steady look. “A camel.”

“Some things are more possible than others.”

“And you do this why?” Dean did not break eye contact. Neither did Misha, who seemed to be taking this rather well.

“Because it’s amazing,” he answered. “I spent an afternoon surrounded by almost a thousand people dressed as French Maids one year. We broke a world record.”

The tiniest of smiles tugged at the corner of Dean’s mouth. “I could get behind being surrounded by French Maids.”

“Some of them were men,” Misha pointed out brightly, which made Dean’s smile disappear. “And a bunch ended up passing out from heat exhaustion. That part wasn’t as fun.”

“And why do so many people do this?” Sam asked. “I’m looking at numbers, and you’ve got tens of thousands of people just...doing weird crap that you tell them to do.”

“It’s one of the perks of being a C-list celebrity,” Misha said with a small measure of modesty, sitting back in his chair. “Minions. And how is challenging the humdrum normalcy of the world for a week a bad thing?”

“And you make them do strange things with kale.”

“And some charity work,” Misha pointed out. “A lot of charity work, actually.”

“Fine, fine, whatever.” Dean pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “If we’re going to do this shit, we may as well get started. This will take weeks.”

“You typically only have one week,” Misha pointed out.

Dean froze, then lowered his hand very slowly and fixed Misha with another steady gaze. “A week.”

“To be fair, it’s fifteen people to a team,” Misha offered. “I don’t know how many people you can recruit, but…”

Sam was already shaking his head. “In order to get the same amount of impossibility to reopen the portal, we’d have to complete everything in less than a week,” he said. “Maybe even just one day -- the amount of impossibility that tens of thousands of people packed into a week is, well, nearly impossible. I don’t see how we can match that.”

“The fact that the impossible isn’t as insurmountable in this reality will probably make it easier,” Misha pointed out. “Lower activation energy. And some of the items can probably be done with a level of realism that isn’t even attainable in my reality.”

Dean blinked. “Like?”

Misha grinned. “There’s an item with a ghost, for one.”

 

* * *

 

“Do you know how hard it was to find someone in the Veil who died in their Starbucks apron?” Kevin demanded. "And then get them to _lend_ it to me?'

“No,” Dean replied. He looked over his shoulder at the alarm, to make sure it definitely wasn’t going to be calling the police on them. There weren’t even any LEDs glowing; Kevin had done a good job on it. He lifted the camera. “Can you go a little more ghosty?”

Kevin glared before becoming translucent enough to see through. “You owe me big time.”

“Sure do.” Dean snapped several photos. “Okay...do you know how to write a smartphone app?”

 

* * *

 

“Tell me again why I’m doing this and not you,” Sam called down from the considerable height.

“Because it’s much funnier,” Misha called back up.

“Funnier to who?” Sam looked at the bar he held with trepidation. A trapeze bar was so much heavier than it looked. And safety harness and nets or no, every cell in his body was screaming at him to not jump off the platform.

“Funnier to me.” Misha waved a thumbs-up. “I’m rolling.”

Sam swallowed and tried to override his instinct of self-preservation enough to shift his center of gravity like the instructor had told him. The shoulders of his fed threads were not intended for the movements required in holding the bar out in front of him; he hoped he wouldn’t tear the back of the jacket.

“Are you going to go?” Misha asked.

“Eventually.”

“The longer you stare at it, the worse it’s going to get,” Misha offered helpfully.

“How would you know?” Sam demanded.

“I’ve been cliff diving.”

“You’ve lived a very interesting life and I don’t believe half of it.” Sam shifted. His toes were just off the edge of the platform, wiggling in empty space, and Sam did not like it At All.

“You’re stalling.”

“You noticed.” Sam shut his eyes and took a deep breath, and before he could talk himself out of it, hopped forward off the platform.

_YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!_ his limbic system hollered at him through the first swing forward.

_ACTUALLY NO THIS IS NOT THAT BAD,_ it admitted on the backswing.

_WAIT NO YOU ARE VERY DEFINITELY GOING TO DIE,_ it amended as he levered his legs up to hang by his knees from the bar.

_DYING NOW,_ it affirmed when he reached back up to hang by his hands again.

_ARE WE DEAD YET?_ it demanded as he swung his legs forcefully in front of him to backflip as he let go of the bar.

_IS THIS THE END?_ as he landed, none too gracefully, in the safety net.

_THIS DOESN’T LOOK LIKE HEAVEN, SO YOU MUST HAVE LIVED,_ it conceded as he somersaulted off the edge of the net to land on his feet, which, the instructor had said, was the easiest way to get off the safety net.

Blinking away the moment of vertigo, Sam lifted his hand to answer the high-five that Misha was trying to give him. “Hey! Not bad for only your third time up!”

“I am never doing that again,” Sam said forcefully. “Ever.”

“Fair enough, fair enough,” Misha said, nodding. “How do you feel about hang-gliding?”

 

* * *

 

“The fuck is Twitter?” Dean demanded.

“A social media platform,” Misha replied.

“And who is this Rick guy?”

“A terrible excuse for a human being.”

“And...you sure you don’t want Sam for this?”

Misha’s face went absolutely solemn, almost Cas-like, which Dean already took to mean he was laughing uproariously on the inside. “I think this will make a much better picture, Dean.”

Dean sighed. “And...no one is going to see this, right?”

“I don’t have any Twitter followers in this reality,” Misha assured him. He paused. “Plus, this just might tip the scales in our favor as far as impossible scenarios go.”

Dean blinked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Want a mint first? And can we use my phone?”

 

* * *

 

“You do make a very fetching Joseph,” Misha commented, adjusting his baby belly.

“Just take the damn picture, Sam, before someone sees us,” Dean grumbled.

“Look! Tiny plaid shirts!”

“TAKE THE PICTURE, SAM.”

 

* * *

 

“Of all the things I thought I’d be doing this week,” Dean said, trying to wipe algae off his jeans but succeeding only in grinding it into the grain of the fabric, “I didn’t think being on a failing raft made of empty plastic bottles was going to be one of them.”

“It held together long enough to get the picture,” Misha pointed out, also covered in algae from the waist down as they emerged from the pond. “That’s better than I thought we’d get.”

“You’re a sick individual,” Dean said, cuffing Misha lightly on the shoulder.

“You’re having fun. Admit it.”

“Never.” Dean shoved his hands in his pockets and strode off, leaving a grinning Misha still ankle-deep in the water, but he was fairly sure that Misha had caught the beginnings of his smile before he’d turned to go.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t know,” Sam said dubiously. “We don’t know very many kids.”

Misha sighed, a little wistfully. “I miss mine. They’d be all over this Kepler thing in a heartbeat.” His brow furrowed. “I wonder how Cas is doing with them.”

 

* * *

 

“WHERE IS YOUR MOTHER?!?” Castiel exclaimed, holding a wriggling child at arm’s length while another cackled maniacally as he ran in circles about him. “AND WHERE DID YOU FIND THIS MUCH GLITTER?”

 

* * *

 

“When I said ‘hang-gliding,’ I meant--”

“I know exactly what you meant, Misha. Fuck you, it’s your turn to do something.”

“Fine. Give me the dinosaur mask.”

 

* * *

 

Dean’s face fell into a sad smoothness as he looked at the next item.

“What?” Sam asked.

Dean half-shrugged. “Find someone who isn’t an immediate family member who sacrificed something to get us where we are today. And video us thanking them.” He looked up. “Most of the people who have sacrificed something for us are dead.”

Sam stared into empty space for a moment. “I mean...there’s Jody, or Donna. And we could give Kevin another call. Or Linda, for that matter.”

Misha cleared his throat, and Dean glanced over at him. The serious expression on his face was somehow different from the other serious expressions he’d assumed over the past few days, and it dawned on Dean that perhaps the strange, frustrating man was going to actually be sincere about something.

“I...don’t know if you’d consider it. But...well, you know that I play Cas. In my reality, on the TV show.”

“Yeah.” Dean bobbed a quick nod. He didn’t want to think too hard about it. It made his head hurt.

“I could...technically stand in for Cas. I am him, in a way. He’s a part of me.” Misha shrugged, looking down at the ground, suddenly seeming bashful. “It’s an actor thing,” he said to his shoes by way of explanation.

Sam shrugged. “If you think it’ll count, then fine.”

“I am the final judge for these things,” Misha pointed out. “I think I’ll allow it.” He looked around. “You got some clothes of his lying around anywhere?”

They did, in fact, have some clothes of Cas’s lying around. He’d apparently been in a bathrobe (as was becoming more and more the norm) when the mysterious, inexplicable swap had occurred, and the familiar overcoat and suit was draped over the back of a chair in the reclusive angel’s room. Dean left Misha to change and he made his way back to the library.

“Is there any way to tell if we’re getting closer?” he asked Sam plaintively. “How many items have we done?”

“Forty,” Sam replied, brow furrowed at the screen. “But they’re mostly the easy ones. We might have to actually start doing the heavy hitters if we want to make any sort of difference.”

“I’m not riding a camel,” Dean said firmly.

“What do you need a camel for?” a familiar voice asked from the doorway.

Dean jumped and he looked up to see...Cas. It wasn’t just the clothing; the way the man held himself, his eyes, his _presence_...Cas was there.

“I got this,” Sam murmured as he pulled his phone from his pocket. Dean’s gaze flicked between his brother and the angel -- not the angel, it wasn’t really Cas, except it _was_ \-- and he took a steadying breath as he crossed the room.

“Cas,” he said, and then it was impossible for him to believe that it was anybody but the angel standing in front of him. “I...you’ve done a lot for us. For me. Given up a lot for me. And I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked you for it.”

The corner of Cas’s mouth quirked up in a small, sad smile. “You don’t have to, Dean.”

“Yeah, actually, I think I do.” Dean swallowed. “You’ve gone to the mat for us a thousand times over. You’ve -- you’ve been there. Even when you didn’t have to be. We’ve been through a lot together. And...I just wanna say...thanks, man.”

And, because it seemed like the right thing to do, Dean pulled Cas into a rough hug.

As the impossibly bright flash of light faded into spots in front of his eyes, he realized he still had his arms around the angel. Hurriedly he stepped back, the green blotches fading, but the angel still looked oddly shimmery. Dean rubbed his eyes and looked again. No, he was just...shiny. And wearing the most ridiculous shirt Dean had ever seen.

“Cas?” he asked.

The angel still looked a little wild around the eyes. “Dean? What happened? How did you bring me back?”

“Is that glitter?” Dean asked instead of answering. He looked down at himself. “Did you just get glitter all over me?”

“You don’t want to know,” Cas said darkly. He looked over at Sam, who hurriedly lowered the phone he’d been filming with. “How did you bring me back?” he repeated.

Sam cleared his throat. “Just...a few days of doing the impossible,” he replied. He jabbed at the “save” button on the phone. He’d show Cas the video later. Of all the impossible things they’d done, for that to have been the tipping point just underlined how important it was for Cas to see it.

“So where have you been?” Dean asked.

Cas let out a long sigh and looked down at his glittering flamingos. “Whoever I changed places with has two very spirited young children. I gather I looked like their father.”

Dean smirked. “Yeah. Kinda.” He pointed. “Go take a shower. Get that craft herpes out of the bunker.”

As Cas trudged out of the library, leaving a bright pink trail in his wake, Dean lowered himself into the chair next to Sam.

“Admit it,” Sam said after a few moments. “You had fun.”

“Did not.” Dean rubbed his eyes before remembering that he had glitter on his hands. He groaned inwardly. Between the kale and the hot glue and the glitter he was fairly certain the bunker would never recover from the last several days.

“He had a point, though,” Sam pushed. “Giving ‘normalcy’ the finger -- without, you know, having to stab things -- was a nice break from the usual.”

“Sure,” Dean grunted. “You get that video?”

Sam swallowed. “Uh, no. The energy surge must have reset the phone.”

Dean nodded. “Good. That was a bit touchy-feely.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think Cas deserves to hear it? The real Cas?”

Hesitating, Dean glanced in the direction of the shower. “Maybe. Eventually.”

“How about today?” Sam suggested. “While we’re still in the mood for doing the impossible.”

“Maybe,” Dean conceded.

There were a few beats of silence, and then,

“I kind of wish I got to ride the camel.”

 

 


End file.
